


If You Could Turn Your Face Up to the Sun

by peachchild



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Nat wanted to be a ballerina, Pre-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, friendship fic, fuck everything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-29
Updated: 2014-06-29
Packaged: 2018-02-06 18:26:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1867875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peachchild/pseuds/peachchild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“A ballerina.” She twitched an eyebrow up at him, ran her middle finger around the edge of her coffee cup. “When I was still young and thought I had a choice about what I wanted to do with my life. It’s kind of a cliche, isn’t it?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	If You Could Turn Your Face Up to the Sun

**Author's Note:**

  * For [musingsofashley](https://archiveofourown.org/users/musingsofashley/gifts).



Steve was fond of Paris. 

He had been ever since the War, when he helped the French drive the Germans out of their city, when he watched the French grit their teeth, buckle down and do what had to be done to protect their city, their country. As he often said, “The country surrendered, but the people didn’t.” 

It was beautiful now, in its way, built up around its many tragedies, smudged in the corners, like a painting touched with sooty fingers. The lights didn’t glow so much as they burned, soft around the edges, and he watched from his rooftop as the clock struck midnight and the Eiffel Tower burst into light. “It didn’t used to do that, you know,” he murmured, gesturing toward it, the ice clinking against his glass, amber liquid sloshing inside. 

Natasha had draped herself across the bench one of the residents had set up on the rooftop, among a small garden. Her hair was scraped up on top of her head, and she rolled her cool glass across her forehead, a balm against the warm night. “I know.” Her tolerance for alcohol was higher than most, but there was a flush creeping up her neck, her accent pronounced. She wouldn’t be able to convince anyone she wasn’t Russian right now. “They did that in 2000, to celebrate the new millenium. I guess they liked it enough to keep it.”

Steve made a sound in the back of his throat, acknowledging. “I haven’t been in Paris - _really_ in Paris - since 1943.” His mouth twitched slightly at the memory. “Bucky got roped into a game of cards at a bar near Montmartre. The guy got him drunk and took him for everything he had.” 

“You didn’t stop him?”

“There’s no stopping Bucky when he decides he’s going to do something.” Steve threw a smile over his shoulder at her, left his post near the edge of the roof to slump down beside her. “The city was ravaged by war then, but it was still Paris.” 

“I lived here once,” Natasha said quietly, her head tipped to the side. “Not for very long. No matter what I did, I could not keep the Russian out of my French accent.” She smiled up at him, leaned her head against his shoulder. “I couldn’t keep a cover here for the life of me. I had to kill way more men than I was really supposed to.” 

“For SHIELD?”

“No.” 

“Ah.” He patted her knee, didn’t ask any more questions, and she didn’t offer to answer any.

“You’re not drunk, huh?”

“No.” He swirled the bourbon in his glass, frowned down into its depths. “Can’t manage it anymore. Tried once, during the War. Haven’t tried since.” 

Natasha hummed. “You’re trying now.”

“No. You’d know if I was trying.” He lifted the bottle by its neck, sloshed the liquid inside to demonstrate how much was left. _It would be empty_ , he was saying. _It would be empty and I would despair_.

They did this more often than one might expect - not in Paris, necessarily, but when missions brought them to cities that spread out with spiderwebs of light, buildings piercing the sky like so many jagged teeth, and a need for quiet, high up away from the drag and gravity of the millions of people surging through their lives, overcame them, they found a place like this one. They settled in and didn’t stand guard for once. “It’s not always our responsibility,” Natasha reminded Steve once. “Sometimes we have to let them take care of themselves.” 

There was a time when Steve wasn’t sure that he liked her. Well, it wasn’t so much about liking her as trusting her. He had convinced himself for so long that morality was cut-and-dry. It was clear who the good guys were, and who were the bad guys. He wanted everyone free and safe and happy, and while he didn’t want to always be the person who guaranteed that safety, he was determined to be, if he needed to.

“You have to take care of yourself,” Natasha told him once, in a bar in Casablanca. She had been quoting Humphrey Bogart for the majority of the mission, and Steve was equal parts pleased that he knew the references and irritated that she was so relaxed. “Protecting everyone in the world is all fine and dandy, but if you’re running low on ammo, you have to take the time to reload.” 

“Did you just use a gun metaphor?”

“Work with me, Rogers.” She tipped her glass this way and that, making several perfect wet circles on the wood grains of the bar. She hadn’t taken a single drink from it. Steve knew it was for show. “You have to stay alive, in order to do them any good. And sometimes staying alive means more than just… being alive.” 

He didn’t say anything, just met her eyes, green in the warm red light of the bar, and only by the flutter of her dark lashes did he know that she was sharing something more than he was understanding. He didn’t ask her to clarify, because she wouldn’t, and he knew that too. He touched the rim of his glass to hers with a soft clink, and smiled. “Do you think we could get them to play ‘As Time Goes By’?” 

Her mouth split open in a smile. “I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship.” 

* * * 

“Stay just like that.” 

“What?” Natasha started to turn her head but stilled immediately when Steve made a noise in his throat just this side of pained. “What’s going on, Rogers? Is there a wasp or something?”

“No.” Steve dug around in his bag, found the sketchbook he’d stuffed in it for just this purpose. “The light is _perfect_. You should see the way the sun looks on your face right now.”

Natasha rolled her eyes but humored him. “You going to draw me?” 

“I am.” He dropped the book on the cafe table, went back to fishing in his bag. “I know I have charcoal pencils in here somewhere,” he murmured, irritated. “Aha! Here we go.” He settled back in his chair, flipped open to a blank page, skimming past rough sketches of the DC skyline, the National Mall as he’s seen it in the early morning, a portrait done of Bucky as a kid drawn from memory after a bad dream, Peggy’s wrinkled hands where they lay on her blankets in the hospital, sketches of Natasha herself.

He’d never really thought about how often he drew Natasha, but he supposed it made sense. He often created things based on what he saw; it was easier for him than pulling from his memories or inventing something completely. It took less energy, if he was honest with himself, and some kinds of energy he needed to conserve. And Natasha certainly struck a figure. He had often drawn her outlined in cocktail dresses dragged to the image of her heightened femininity, with her bright red hair and her cat eyes and the slopes and curves of her hourglass figure, stark against the images of her burned into his mind, the deadly force of her hands and legs and smile. He had never seen her dolled up, probably never would, but he had a feeling she could kill someone just as easily in stilettos as she could in a catsuit. 

“Do you draw anyone else or am I the only one subject to this particular form of torture?”

Steve snorted, sketching out the lines of her profile, the soft slope of her nose and purse of her lips. “I draw lots of people. I like to draw Nick. He has such interesting lines to his face.”

“Ever shown them to him?”

“No. He’d be offended by how tired I draw him.”

Natasha almost laughed, but caught herself with just a tremor of her shoulders. “He does look tired.”

Steve hummed, hunched over his sketchbook, which he had balanced against his knee. He darkened the space under her cheekbones, stroked off a line at the corner of her almost-smiling mouth. He almost said, _So do you_ , because sometimes Natasha stood on legs so deliberately straight, with her head hanging like her neck and shoulders couldn’t hold it anymore, like the weight of everything she did and still had to do was dragging her down to earth, her very own private chains. He almost said it, but he didn’t. 

“You know, before the War, I wanted to go to art school,” he commented, absently rubbing at a black smudge on the edge of his hand. “Sometimes, when we were short on cash, and Bucky looked like he was going to collapse if he worked any more hours, I would do caricatures, out by Coney Island. Sell ‘em for ten cents a pop.” 

“Must have been rolling in the dough,” Natasha murmured dryly, settled back in her chair now, her shoulders still kept carefully straight, like she was balancing a level on them. Her eyes followed the people on the street. Steve wondered what she was seeing: potential threats, potential victims, lives she might have lived if she’d been able to choose her own.

“It bought the milk at any rate, some bread to butter in the mornings.” He shrugged. “I didn’t like not contributing, and it was something I was good at.” 

“What would you have done, if you hadn’t gotten into the Army? Would you have gone to school?” 

“I would have done whatever I could.” Steve’s jaw ticked, a sharp reminder at the back of his mouth of how helpless he’d felt, how useless, like a little boy without even a red wagon to collect scrap metal. “Even the women were helping then, joining up to build planes and bombs, training as nurses. And there I was in the middle, completely unable to do my part.”

“But it worked out in the end, didn’t it?” Natasha’s eyes flicked over in his direction, catching the sunlight and going gold around the edges. “You got to join up. You became _Captain America_ \- the face of the US military.” She paused. “Bucky - whatever happened to him?” 

Steve’s hand stilled. He forgot, sometimes, that there was no reason anyone would know anything about Bucky. Of course, people knew Captain America. They even might have known the Howling Commandos. Those things were in history books. They made films and documentaries about them. But he never wondered if anyone ever saw the faces in those photos and wondered about the people behind them. For them, the James “Bucky” Barnes that was mentioned offhand in the caption of a photo, among a bunch of other guys laughing, guns slung over their shoulders, cigarettes drooping from the corners of their mouths, might have just been one more of the thousands of men who worked so hard to win that war.

Natasha, who sat across the table from him, blinking slowly, patient, had no reason to be any different from anyone else.

“He died,” Steve said shortly, smudged out a line that jolted out of place, leaving Natasha looking stark and gaunt, like an alert doe, ears twitching. “And I couldn’t do anything about it. A lot of good Captain America is, huh?” 

The corner of her mouth quirked up, somehow serene, lacking the cynicism that always seemed to sharpen the softness of her face. “He must have thought you were doing some good.” 

He snapped the sketchbook closed, the left half of her face left there in limbo, her right eye incomplete, the corner of her mouth on the edge of smiling. leaned on his arm on the table, took a sip of the coffee that had long since gone cold. “I’m not so sure.” 

“Well, Rogers, he pretty much followed you into the mouth of hell.” Natasha tossed her head, let her curtain of red hair swing to behind her. “I have done a lot of things in the names of a lot of people, but there aren’t many people I would die for.” 

The back of Steve’s throat stung, and he thought of Peggy, sitting in that bombed-out bar, her eyes dark and sure and leaving no room for argument: _He damn well must have thought you were worth it_. 

Before he could respond, she shifted back in her chair, uncrossed her legs to recross them the other way, and smiled brightly at him. “I wanted to be a ballerina.”

“What?”

“A ballerina.” She twitched an eyebrow up at him, ran her middle finger around the edge of her coffee cup. “When I was still young and thought I had a choice about what I wanted to do with my life. It’s kind of a cliche, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

“To be Russian and want to be a ballerina.” Natasha dipped her finger in her coffee, brought it to her lips to suck it off. “But I suppose becoming a Russian spy is equally cliche.” 

Steve wondered if he was supposed to laugh. He didn’t; he found himself feeling incredibly sad. “Things don’t always go our way, do they?”

“No.” Her voice was soft, eyes focused somewhere far away. “I guess we don’t.” She shifted her gaze off toward the building across the street, then leaned forward, picking up her cup. “There’s our target.” She took a long sip, casual, and pushed her chair back. 

A moment later, Steve followed suit, his focus narrowed down to the man walking at a deliberately ordinary pace, the suitcase swinging at his side clutched tightly in white knuckles. He followed Natasha’s clipped steps across the road, watched the confidence with which she canted her hips, her hair bouncing around her shoulders, and thought, _We’re not so different, the two of us_ , and for the first time, didn’t feel seventy years removed from anything that made sense.


End file.
